I just bought a Neato X-11 at Costco. It's freaky. Now I want one of those robots from the "I,Robot" movie. Oh, and the iRobot vacuum isn't as good as the Neato. This thing scans the entire room with a laser before it begins.

/Hopefully they're hiring "robot sanitizers" in place of the [one would hope] hand-washing humans who would previously have done this labor... //A hospital seems like a bad place for a sick person to hang out ///Today's secret word is: nosocomial

Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were a crawl with the smallcleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustachedrunner, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. They like mysterious invaders, theypopped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

"Not only will they assistallow us to reduce staff to do their jobs more efficiently without the risk of painful injuries, they will reduce accidental cross-contamination of goods during transport," Ms Skinner said.

If they're delivering food from the cafeteria to a given floor or unit, fine. If, however, they are replacing humans in delivering food to individual patients; that's a horrible idea. It is impossible to assign a single nurse to each patient. The legion of employees tromping in and out of a hospital room with cleaning supplies, to empty the garbage, to deliver the lunch; all have an opportunity to observe the patient and alert a nurse if needed. I briefly worked in a hospital as a teenager. (It's hard to express how much I hated that job.) It was amazing how often someone, who was not part of the care team, ended up alerting those who were to the benefit of the patient. I don't think a food delivery robot will walk into a room and shout down the hall "Hey, can some o'ya'll come down and look at Mr. Smith? He don't look right." Conversely, it's amazing how often humans, with little more training that what is necessary to prepare food or clean, can spot that something is amiss just before a person slides into a seizure or other crisis.